The Truth About Deborah Cowell
You know, I suppose without ever even realizing it I have pretty much always been on my own. When I seriously take a moment to think about the strange context of my adoption, the way that I was socialized in school and in a conservative religious home environment, all while really kinda knowing all along that the 360 degree round peg that I am never really quite fit into the 360 square holes I was being asked to force myself into, I kinda just live with the knowledge that I have stayed the course as myself all these years. I have been my entire life a tiny minnow moving forward in a tumultuous sea, never having been lost. Just looking. Just swimming dark waters, illuminating myself.
I cannot say that I am relieved, excited, or disappointed at having met my birth mother. Yes, she was born in Jamaica; yes I was born in New York, two years after she emigrated, back when all five boroughs were 212. And I grew up here. Yes, we are American. I can say there is definitely a sense of closure — the same one might feel when they read a thick tome only to fine that someone has removed a chapter. At some point the person goes somewhere that has the complete work, they read and they are like, “Oh, okay.” There are other connections you are able to make once you have that missing part. Hindsight realizations. A missing piece can often be a key. And when the key is turned…still black. Still strong. Still Deborah Cowell. Stronger. Epiphanies come with forward motion.
People can be mean when they think you don’t know who you really are. But I have always known. The set of variables in the future I had available to me before I met my birth mother, biological uncle, and first cousin on my birth mother’s side, were all catastrophic — just look at the past literature that tells little black girls in America who they are supposed to think they aren’t. I have no idea the depth of that alternate truth. The energy/life force that is me rejected all of that immediately. My mind could not accept it. I am, by definition, catastrophe’s antidote. Having fully become myself, that alternate reality of me has weakened, broken off, and become irrelevant to the point where it is completely destroyed. It is not even a particle to be examined. Which, given the way time works, kinda lets you know all of that which has happened was supposed to kinda happen all along. And it makes being me kinda cool.
What was being given to me all along is experience. And objectivity.
If our mandate is, “All you have to do is live your life,” then I have retained the most positive and simple interpretation of that charge. This does not mean there are not intricately woven parts. But it is kind of like how a rose is a rose even when it is described to someone as a Cartesian parametric equation.
Rather than trying to figure out all the meta-linguistic representation, I simply live as the mathematical principle that I actually am. I look at others around me…The cat sleeping on the floor next to my feet…The cup of water on the desk where I am sitting. The computer screen. The blink of the cursor. The eyes that read this sentence. All of this…these are equations, but they are not paradox. I am so not the person to overthink what all of this means, in quite the same way that no rose contemplates its existence. We should all be so lucky — to one day be companions to the unicorns in the imaginary gardens in which we all live. As ourselves. No less and certainly no more.
Being adopted, as best as I can perceive, means being left to one’s devices and figuring out in a cerebral way what it means to be loved. As soon as you meet your biological family, if you ever do, you understand the incomprehensible missing connection that you did not know you did not have but was still somehow always there that folks who grew up with their folks take for granted, even if they themselves adopt. And then, if you are so inclined and have the presence of mind, you get to decide what that means. You get to look at it. Touch it. Feel it. Deconstruct it if you like. But with the caveat that neither you nor anyone else can rewind time. Which is the same exact truth if the meeting never happens at all. Either way is not luck but simply what happens. At some point you walk up to the mirror that offers your best reflection and you ask, “Am I happy with what I see here?” The answer determines the strength of the fabric of your universe. My mirror — the place where I look at my reflection most — is in my written work. Some things fall away. Other stuff continues. There is no reason at all for me to change a single thing.
